1 You will say, perhaps, that we are making a fresh attempt to recommend ourselves to your favour. What, do we need letters of recommendation to you, or from you, as some others do?[1] 2 Why, you yourselves are the letter we carry about with us, written in our hearts, for all to recognize and to read. 3 You are an open letter from Christ, promulgated through us; a message written not in ink, but in the Spirit of the living God, with human hearts, instead of stone, to carry it. 4 Such, through Christ, is the confidence in which we make our appeal to God. 5 Not that, left to ourselves, we are able to frame any thought as coming from ourselves; all our ability comes from God, 6 since it is he who has enabled us to promulgate his new law to men. It is a spiritual, not a written law; the written law inflicts death, whereas the spiritual law brings life. 7 We know how that sentence of death, engraved in writing upon stone, was promulgated to men in a dazzling cloud, so that the people of Israel could not look Moses in the face, for the brightness of it, although that brightness soon passed away. 8 How much more dazzling, then, must be the brightness in which the spiritual law is promulgated to them! 9 If there is a splendour in the proclamation of our guilt, there must be more splendour yet in the proclamation of our acquittal; 10 and indeed, what once seemed resplendent seems by comparison resplendent no longer, so much does the greater splendour outshine it.[2] 11 What passed away passed in a flash of glory; what remains, remains instead in a blaze of glory.

12 Such is the ground of our confidence, and we speak out boldly enough. 13 It is not for us to use veiled language, as Moses veiled his face. He did it, so that the people of Israel might not go on gazing at the features of the old order, which was passing away. 14 But in spite of that, dullness has crept over their senses, and to this day the reading of the old law is muffled with the same veil; no revelation tells them that it has been abrogated in Christ. 15 To this day, I say, when the law of Moses is read out, a veil hangs over their hearts.[3] 16 There must be a turning to the Lord first, and then the veil will be taken away. 17 The Spirit we have been speaking of is the Lord; and where the Lord’s Spirit is, there is freedom. 18 It is given to us, all alike, to catch the glory of the Lord as in a mirror, with faces unveiled; and so we become transfigured into the same likeness, borrowing glory from that glory, as the Spirit of the Lord enables us.[4]

[3] vv. 5-15: St Paul compares the position of the Christian missionary, announcing the new law of life, that is, the Gospel, with that of Moses announcing to the Jews the old law, by which sinners are condemned. Moses received the law on tables of stone; the Gospel must be thought of as engraved upon men’s hearts. We are told in Ex. 34.29-35 that Moses’ face shone with an unearthly radiance after he had conversed with God on Mount Sinai; for a time, he had to wear a veil, because the Israelites could not bear to look on this brightness. How much more do the faces of Christ’s ministers shine with the reflection of his glory! But they do not throw any veil over the glory they have witnessed; they grow in likeness to Christ. It is the Jews who wear a veil over their faces, listening to the law of Moses sabbath after sabbath and never learning to see the glory of Christ revealed there.

[4] vv. 17-18. Many different renderings have been given of these two verses, and it is perhaps impossible for us to ascertain the exact sense in which St Paul wrote them. It is not certain, in the Greek, whether ‘catch’ means ‘catch sight of’, or ‘reflect’.